Architect of Unyielding Designs Takes Top Prize

Thom Mayne, known for tough, unorthodox designs as well as verbal fracases, was as shocked as anyone at winning his field's top prize.

Thom Mayne, the Santa Monica architect known for hard-edged, aggressively unconventional designs, today will be named the winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize, the field's most prestigious honor.

Mayne, whose most prominent completed projects include the new Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, is the first American architect to win the prize since Robert Venturi in 1991 and the first from Southern California since Frank O. Gehry in 1989.

"My first reaction was shock," Mayne, 61, said in an interview at the airy if surprisingly nondescript offices of Morphosis, the firm he co-founded in 1972. "When you run a cultural and artistic practice, as we do, instead of just a business, you never know where it's going to lead."

He's not likely to be the only one surprised by the news. Although Pritzker winners have included several members of the architectural avant-garde, Mayne has been considered one of the most polarizing figures in architecture. His verbal battles with clients and builders are legendary in the profession. And there is nothing traditionally beautiful or explicitly welcoming about his designs.

"I'm interested in conflict and confrontation," Mayne said.

His buildings, often cloaked in canted or folded metal screens, giving them a dramatic silver-gray cast, have a muscular presence. They use fragmented forms to express the anomie of contemporary life -- and of sprawling, centerless Los Angeles in particular.

"There is a real authenticity to the work that we liked," said Gehry, a member of this year's Pritzker jury. "There's no denying he has carved out his own path and hasn't strayed from it. He's not copying anybody else."

Another juror, Karen Stein, editorial director of publisher Phaidon Press in New York, praised Mayne for designs that had "consistently explored and expressed architecture as a risk-taking, visceral experience."

The Pritzker is often called the Nobel Prize of architecture because of its prestige and because it honors an architect's body of work rather than a particular project. When Chicago's Pritzker family, founders of the Hyatt hotel chain, established the prize in the 1970s, they did so in part because the Nobel Prize did not include an architecture category.

The first Pritzker Prize, in 1979, went to Philip Johnson. In the years since, it has been awarded to elder statesmen -- Danish architect Jorn Utzon won in 2003, more than three decades after designing the Sydney Opera House -- and younger, more experimental figures, such as last year's winner, Britain's Zaha Hadid, the first female laureate.

The award comes as Morphosis, which built its early reputation with small, idiosyncratic projects such as the Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills, is winning huge commissions around the world. An 18-story, $144-million federal office building in San Francisco, a $70-million federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore., and a 165-unit apartment complex in Madrid are all in the works.

Although Mayne tends to describe his architecture as progressive and optimistic, others see its forms as alienating, even nihilistic. To the walkways suspended above the playground of the Science Center School in Exposition Park, finished last year, Mayne added metal screens that from certain angles resemble blades, their chiseled edges pointing straight down over kindergartners' heads.

The Caltrans building is another case in point. After it opened last fall, detractors quickly dubbed it the "Death Star." Its facade -- roughly 400 feet long by 200 feet high -- is among the most monolithic in the city, with a skin of aluminum panels that open and close in response to the amount of sunlight on the building.

Mayne seems proud to have completed a building of its architectural significance on a tight timeframe and for relatively little money -- about $145 per square foot, which he called "basically a warehouse budget." He talks about the result in sunny terms that are distinctly at odds with the brooding face the building turns to the city.

"The design is all about connectivity," he said, citing the gathering spaces on its broad plaza and skip-stop elevators that he says encourage employees to walk between floors and interact with one another. "I absolutely see it as hopeful. You simply can't put in the kind of energy and passion that's required to complete a design of that size if you don't feel that way."

Sometimes, Mayne's confrontational style produces unexpected results. On the Oregon courthouse project, he found himself working with a client, U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, who seemed in many ways his opposite: conservative, evangelical and deeply traditional. In their early meetings, Mayne challenged Hogan's religious beliefs. Hogan, the architect recalled, played "The Star-Spangled Banner" on his car stereo as the two drove around looking at courthouse architecture.